The Hades Hotel
It is my pleasure to introduce this subterranean tale by Rosie Dastgir author of A Small Fortune as the last of our three Ghost Stories of Old London written specially for the season by Spitalfields Life Contributing Writers.
“Tread carefully over the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, piles and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day.” – Peter Ackroyd, London Under
They worked around the clock, the tunnel gang of twenty men. It was vital, they were told, to reduce the likelihood of settlement while the tunnels were constructed. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Even on Christmas Day. Jake and Ivan were two of twelve tunnellers who worked below ground at the front of the machine, while the remaining eight worked from the rear to over ground. Ivan was from the Ukraine, and Jake was his one English mate, who’d befriended him in the early weeks, when everything was mysterious and alien. Ivan longed for his family, and was counting the days till Christmas, his life reduced to a timeline until he was reunited with them. It was grueling, the work, tunneling deep beneath the Eocene clay of the muddy Thames, dirty and exhausting, and he missed the comforts of home. His wife and four children were expecting him on Christmas Eve, but he dared not make promises. He needed the overtime, and as they’d offered him the work, he’d be mad to turn it down.
At first, it had seemed a great adventure, working on the visionary Crossrail project, and being part of such an astonishing feat of engineering. But Ivan suffered bouts of uneasiness almost from the moment the work began, with excavations uncovering things that should be left well alone. Charnel houses were unearthed, and a Roman baptistery discovered. Nearby, a skeleton of a baby. They’d come across a massive femur and joked that it must have belonged to a giant that had roamed the earth in prehistoric times, only to discover they’d been fooled: it was a mammoth’s bone.
Wherever you looked, you could not escape the dead down there, layered in sediments, packed into the darkness that surrounded the tunnel. Many an evening Ivan had drowned his fears in vodka laced beer, wondering what he was doing here, toiling in the underworld beneath a city that was opaque to him, a massive, inscrutable sprawl, linked by stations with baffling names. He did not like to think about the weight of water that pressed down upon them as he operated the slurry clearing machine, sealed in a tight tunnel snaking through infernal darkness. As the days had grown shorter, the nights longer, he had been plagued with insomnia, too fearful to fall asleep for what his dreams might bring.
He arrived at dusk for work that day, to find Jake waiting for him at the mouth of the works site, smoking a cigarette, as he finished his tea. The previous night, the two men had been out drinking at the Star of the East in Canning Town, downing shot after shot, until they were legless. That was a new word for Ivan. It was how they survived, the drinking, or so they told each other. After closing time, Ivan had wound his drunken way home to the rickety high rise in Stratford where he lodged, miraculously reaching his front door unscathed. But Jake was not so lucky. He’d taken a fall on the matt black ice that skimmed the streets, skidding headfirst into the gritty path. His grazed forehead shone in the floodlit building site, pink and raw as an exotic peeled fruit.
“What happened to you?” Ivan wanted to know.
“Had a fight with the pavement outside my house.”
Jake grinned through a cloud of fag smoke while Ivan worked out the idiom.
“Fell flat on my face, didn’t I? Don’t laugh!”
“But it sounds funny, fighting the pavement. ”
“Hurts, it does. So, you got back in one piece, then?”
Ivan shrugged. “Suppose so.”
Jake scrutinised his friend’s pallid features carefully. “You look like you could do with a fry up. Get something later at the caf, yeah? C’mon, Santa Claus, Christmas is coming, and we gotta get tunnelling.”
A flurry of fat snow flakes drifted down from the sky, flecking Ivan’s moustache as he looked up for one last glance of the outside world before going to work.
“What would I do without you, Jake?” he smiled.
The question was heartfelt. For it was Jake who had taken him on the bus to Moorfields Eye Hospital, when he had woken up a few weeks ago to find that he was unable to see in one eye. The inexplicable blindness had been experienced by other tunnellers, a hushed epidemic that nobody mentioned on site. At the hospital, a doctor had prescribed him a course of eye drops and, before very long, his sight returned. But something disturbing had happened to alter his vision, so that he began to suffer strange sightings when he went back to work in the tunnel.
He began to see things, granular and grey, at the periphery of his vision while he drilled out the tunnel. The shapes were indistinct, though at times he experienced the rushing sensation of people passing through him, as though he were ethereal. At first he wondered if it was his eyesight, or a drink too many, that was producing these sensations. As time wore on, the sightings became more ominous.
That evening, he was dead tired as he went to work, his head and eyes throbbing with the effects of his hangover. At the bottom of the shaft was a door, scarcely visible, that he’d noticed once before. Nobody else could see it but him, and he saw that something hovered and fretted upon the other side. Flooded with unease, and yet unable to resist, he took the plunge and went through the door.
What he saw horrified him. Vast gloomy caverns, filled with legions of men in cages, wiry and filthy, digging foul earth by the light of flaming torches, their faces red and contorted as they sang mournful shanties. The walls were beaded with oily water, and evil gases plumed from the depths of the earth. Ivan found himself choking for air, his eyes stinging so much that he feared he would be blinded. Yet he could not tear himself from the scene, horrifying though it was. Mesmerised, he gawped in awe, as flames spewed forth at the rock face, green and orange and strange colours he had never seen before.
Then something made him long to flee for his life, but he was rooted to the spot. It was the shape, like a man but gargantuan, that had been hovering at the edge of his vision. The giant stood seven feet tall, a brawny figure, with blackened torso and harrowed features, waist high in water in the penumbral cavern. When he opened his mouth to speak, Ivan could not see his face.
You can’t imagine it, the evil, the horror that lies underground! You fear the fire at the rock face even more than the river Thames that threatens to drown you! You fear the very ground beneath your feet will swallow you up into the dreadful darkness, a pitch black void that sucks out your soul.
The foul air made Ivan gasp as he tried to take in the giant’s pronouncements. He gestured towards him with his outstretched hand, only to see it vanish, swallowed in darkness. Looking up, his eyes met Phineas’ hollow, unseeing gaze, his pupils round as saucers, violet black, as he spoke.
The infernal gases are terrible, poisoning the eyes, destroying the vision and damning the body and soul. Mark my warning, Ivan. This is the Hades Hotel.
Terror bloomed in his chest. He would be blinded for life like this ogre!
Best left untouched, these depths, best left unchartered, left well alone. You are defying the natural world – you were not made to carry out this desecration of the earth.
In truth, Ivan had little idea what, if anything, he had been made for. To take care and support his family, to live a long and happy life. Simple, earthly things that made him yearn for home.
“Who are you? What is it you want from me?”
You know who I am. You’ve seen me many times –
“That was you? The dark form at my shoulder?”
It was. My name is Phineas.
“But what on earth are you? A devil? A spirit?”
The giant seemed to soften for a moment, his unseeing eyes illuminated with a fleck of gold in the gloom.
I am nothing, a wandering soul caught in limbo. I left my wife a widow, my children fatherless, fending for themselves in the workhouse. And I am one of hundreds, Ivan. The damp and the darkness hastened our early deaths, snatching us down to the underworld. Like you, we drank beer laced with gin, to survive the horrors.
“You know what I drink? Are you watching me? ”
The giant sighed.
Everything, yes, it is my curse, for I am blinded yet a seer, like my namesake, Phineas, the Thracian king, tortured by what I must carry with me, for centuries, my warnings going unheeded in these dark, desolate tunnels. They keep digging! They keep digging! Deeper and deeper into the darkness, hollowing out the precious earth!
Fading into the craggy folds of darkness, Phineas grew indistinct.
“Don’t go!” Ivan cried. “Finish what you have to say!”
But apparition was gone, leaving Ivan uncertain that it had been no more than a figment of his own dark imaginings.
* * * *
Jake and Ivan ate breakfast together at the end of their shift, at Jake’s favourite café in Limehouse, where they served chips with everything, even pasta. Usually it was Ivan’s favourite antidote to a hangover, but his nerves had destroyed his appetite. He watched as Jake stabbed his fried egg with a fork stacked with black pudding, chips, and half a sausage, sliding his omelette to one side of the plate.
Jake fixed his gaze upon the food. “What’s up? Innit any good?”
“We don’t eat these baked beans where I come from,” Ivan said gloomily. “I’m sorry.”
Jake shrugged. “Whatever you say. Give ‘em to me – silly to waste ‘em. What’s up?”
“Do you know much about this tunnel we’re building? I mean, is there…. Has there ever been another one built like it?”
Jake finished a mouthful.
“Yeah, there’s loads of tunnels up and down the Thames – bridges and that. London’s world famous for it.”
“And round here? In the Isle of Dogs?”
“Yeah. Famous one it was – my great, great, granddad was a mole man, digging out the tunnels, that’s what they called them. Lots of them died, drowned, buried alive –“
“Really?”
“They say he drowned, my great great granddad, when the shaft was flooded… that’s what my dad says.“
Ivan’s heart thudded. “So when was it?” he enquired, as if his interest were purely historical.
Jake paused for a moment. “1840, round then? The first tunnel ever built under the river.”
“Round here?”
“Yeah, Isle of Dogs.” Jake paused for a moment. “Dreadful things went on down there, all for this railway, they said. My dad says there’s cousins of my great great granddad buried in the graveyard in St Anne’s, and there’s no trace of him. They never found his body.”
Ivan felt hot, and wiped his forehead with a ketchup stained napkin.
His mate grinned. “Nah, don’t be scared, mate, it’s safe as houses down there. Them engineers know a thing or two, they do.”
* * * *
Next day Ivan woke with dread. As the December greyness gathered outside, resolving into wooly darkness after a scant few hours of light, he knew he had no choice but to go to work as usual. He eschewed the eye drops for once, convinced that they’d been altering his vision and playing tricks upon him. As he approached the river, he was seized with the urge to turn back, go home to his wife and never return to this place again. Damn the job! Damn the tunnel! He fretted that he should find Jake and warn him of imminent danger that he felt sure would befall them if they continued their work.
He headed towards Poplar, where Jake lived, though he didn’t recall the address. Nothing seemed familiar in the orange-tinged fog, and he circled the streets without luck. He felt sure Jake lived in one of these squat blocks of flats, near a street with a Chinese sounding name. Amoy, was it? Or Canton? As the night stretched on, he grew despondent. And what was the point, telling his English friend? Jake would think him an idiot, dismissing his fears as madness. He’d told him it was fine down there, and he should know, shouldn’t he? An Englishman born and bred, the descendant of a tunneller himself.
A chill wind blew off the Thames, and the earth braced itself as snow began to fall, settling in a thick pall across the city. The landscape was illuminated, and Ivan felt his mood lift as he made his way into St Anne’s Church in Limehouse, drawn by the lamplit windows that glowed in the darkness. He settled himself in the churchyard amongst the weathered gravestones, their uneven granite forms glinting in the shadows. Reading the inscriptions of families perished centuries ago, he grew calm at last, safe in the knowledge that a boundary exists between the living and the dead. All would be well. He must go to work now, he thought, fending off his fears with a last cigarette, dragging slowly until his blood throbbed and buzzed in his veins. Never before had he felt so alive, or so alone. For a moment, he thought he heard voices, distant and haunting, but it was only the choir singing carols in the church, a skein of tones drifting into the ether.
The thought of the overtime he’d earn raised his spirits. He would leave in time for Christmas, just as he’d promised his wife.
* * * *
Christmas Eve crept up upon the world and held it in its grip. Hundreds of meters beneath the humming, light-spangled city, Jake and Ivan were working their last shift of the year before the holidays. Loyal cohorts, they kept watch for one another, as they toiled away, lulled into a stupor by the roar of the slurry clearing machine. Ivan shuddered, pushing away a fleeting image of Phineas, hovering beyond the door at the bottom of the shaft.
“Alright, mate?” Jake said, seeing his friend shiver. “Home in time for the Christmas goose, then?”
Ivan swallowed, clearing his throat of grit.
“Hope so, yeah.”
Midnight came. He and Jake were working alone, at the bottom of the deepest cavern, repairing hairline cracks in the concrete, when they heard the banging from the other side.
Ivan grew rigid with fear.
“What was that?” Jake cried. “That’s not right – “
The banging grew louder, intensified in its desperation, as the men listened in horror.
“The Thames is in! The Thames is in!” came a terrifying voice, booming from beyond the tunnel.
“Get out of here – quickly – Jake, run!” Ivan yelled. “Raise the alarm, warn the others! It is Phineas, come to warn us!”
Too late.
A plangent boom that seemed to come from the earth’s core to the surface of the ground above the tunnel, so that the land flexed and writhed as though it were alive, or so people said later. Ivan would never know, for he was trapped underground. The great river Thames was in, enraged, engorged, flooding the tunnel, bursting its walls.
“Run! Jake! Run! Raise the alarm – they’ll be getting to work any minute!”
They’d practised the emergency drill many times, the tunnel gang, so that Jake did not have to think what to do, racing for the escape shaft.
It was the imprint of horror upon Jake’s features that never left Ivan. A look upon his face that he had never seen before, and never would again, as the wall of water rose up before him, sweeping him to his end. In the blink of an eye he was gone.
Without thinking Ivan gave himself up to the river, its awesome force, tossing him round and round in a whirlpool that never ended, centuries whooshing past in a watery blur, ancient flint and muddy reeds clogging his mouth, flooding his ears, his nose, his head, battering and waterlogging his brain. This was not the abyss he had feared, the blackness that annihilated you. This was water, brackish and gravelly, life giving water, buoying him back to the surface. Like the great engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who built the word’s first subaqueous tunnel under the Thames, he floated up to the top of the shaft, and survived.
When they pumped upon his chest and revived him, the metallic taste of blood mingled with mud filled his mouth, spewing out like a fountain. A front tooth was missing from his jaw, and in its place, he felt something incredibly hard. It was a fossil.
Photo of Brunel’s tunnel courtesy Urban 75
Medallion courtesy Where Thames Smooth Water Glide
A Shaggy Dog Tale
It is my pleasure to introduce this shaggy dog tale by Kate Griffin author of Kitty Peck & the Music Hall Murders as the second of our three Ghost Stories of Old London written specially for the season by Spitalfields Life Contributing Writers – Rosie Dastgir’s story completes the trio tomorrow.
First things first: my grandfather Michael Kelly was always known as Timo. His six children and all of his eighteen grandchildren called him that too. I have a vague recollection of sitting on his knee once while he slurped tea from a saucer (he liked to do that as it made it cool down more quickly) and him asking me why I didn’t call him grandpa. Quite reasonably I replied that grandpa clearly wasn’t his name, so why should I call him anything different.
The matter ended there.
As a very small child I spent a lot of time with Timo. I was ‘quite a handful’ according to my mum and I think it was something of a relief for her to drop me off at her parents’ house in deepest Islington while she took the occasional break.
Fortunately, I could do no wrong as far as Timo was concerned. As the first child of his beloved first daughter (my mum arrived after four sons), I was always assured of a special place in the family tree and my appearance occurred at around the same time Timo officially retired so he had plenty of time on his hands to keep me entertained.
On good days we went out and about, sometimes riding London buses for miles just for the thrill of sitting in the front seat on the top deck. On grey days we sat in the basement kitchen together in front of an old-fashioned range. On these occasions, Timo would roll his own cigarettes (allowing me to pretend smoke my own curl of Rizla paper), sip tea from a saucer and tell me a story.
He had a vast repository of tales – some from his childhood in the East End, some from his days as a soldier in the Great War, some from the docks where he worked and some about the characters he met ‘up west’ when he was doing one of his other mysterious jobs. The concept of portfolio working is nothing new. For all the time I knew him – and I wish there had been more – Timo was always nipping off ‘to see a man about a dog’.
And that brings me to this story – a shaggy-dog tale for Christmas and my favourite of all the yarns that Timo used to spin.
“Do you want to hear the story about a ghost and the bravest girl in London?” he’d say.
And, of course, I did – because that girl was my mum.
* * * *
Saturday, May 10th 1941, was famously the worst night of the London Blitz. Less famously it was also my mum’s sixth birthday. It came at the end of a week of ferocious raids, according to Timo, and although they’d tried to make the day a special occasion, they all wondered what the night would bring.
By 10pm that evening all the younger Kellys and my Nan were bedded down together in the Anderson shelter dug out behind the chicken coop at the end of the garden. Timo went back into the house to ‘check on’ with a few last things. (That actually meant a final smoke and a furtive pint of Guinness, his favourite tipple.)
My grandparents’ house was in a street off New North Road and down towards the City. Including the attic rooms and the basement, it was a five-storey Georgian affair with a delicate fanlight over the front door, a gracious hallway and tall elegant windows. These days it would probably be worth a small fortune, admired for its ‘wonderful’ original features and ‘patina’ of age. But back in 1941 thousands of Londoners lived in gloomy brown houses packed with gloomy brown furniture that were just like it. For them, what we might regard as period charm was actually the inconvenience of impecunity.
No one spoke about the ghost at number 72, although everyone knew the house seemed to have an extra occupant. Things would go missing and appear days later in the most unlikely places. Sometimes mysterious sounds would be heard from a room overhead when everyone knew that there was no one up there. However, the Kellys were a live-and-let-live (or perhaps that should be a live-and-let-die?) sort of family and if there was a ghost they certainly weren’t going to start poking into its business.
So, when Timo stood in the little-used ‘best’ room on the first floor that ominous May evening and stared out at the deserted street before pulling down the black-out blinds, he wasn’t surprised to hear a noise behind him.
He didn’t even turn round. Instead he rolled himself another cigarette, lit it and had a quiet smoke. As he stood there ‘contemplating’ he felt something brush against his leg. He looked down, expecting to see Trouncer the family boxer dog (named after the warship on which the eldest of the Kelly boys was currently serving), but there was nothing there.
Odd, he thought, returning to his roll-up. Then the feeling came again – something was tugging at his trouser turn-ups, just above the ankle. In fact, it pulled so hard that he almost lost his footing. He turned around now and saw that the door to the hall was wide open. He was sure he’d shut it behind him. My Nan didn’t know precisely where he kept his Guinness and he liked to keep it that way.
Timo stubbed out his roll-up. It was time to go back to the shelter. Somehow the thought of being tucked up with the rest of the family, four foot down in that damp fox hole behind the chicken coop didn’t seem quite so bad now.
He stepped out of the ‘best’ room and took the first set of stairs down to the hallway at street level. There was a door in the back sitting room on this floor leading to steps to the garden. Timo headed down the passage towards the back room, but was stopped in his tracks by something that brushed against his leg. Then the tugging came again, this time it was insistent.
It was dark now and he was definitely rattled. Every step he took towards the back room made the peculiar sensation stronger. He told me it felt as if something didn’t want him to go there.
“Right!” he thought. “If you won’t let me out this way, I’ll use the other door.”
Down in the basement there was a second way out to the garden. Just before the kitchen there was a steep flight of stone steps that led to a little-used door leading out to a small yard behind the outside privy.
He turned and went down the hall pausing at the top of the winding set of stairs to the basement.
Nothing happened. Whatever it was, it didn’t mind him being here. He took the first flight and stopped again. Now there was something – a gentle nudging at his calves. It wanted him to go down, he was certain of it. Was that a good thing?
He didn’t have time to consider the question. The sudden wail of the air-raid sirens prompted him to cross the little landing and turn right to the stone steps leading out to the yard, and to the rest of the family in the garden shelter.
Something white moved down there, a little body was huddled against the door.
Timo flew down those ten stone steps and gathered my mum into his arms. A gash ran from her split top lip and up across her left cheek. She was bleeding profusely over her nightgown.
“Sorry, Timo,” she whispered, rubbing blood and tears from her face. “It was the game. I was practising while everyone was asleep, but I fell.”
He knew immediately what ‘game’ she meant.
Despite being warned not to, the younger Kelly boys (my uncles) insisted on challenging each other to take part in a potentially lethal jumping contest on the stone steps leading to the yard door. The winner was the person who dared to jump from the highest stair.
My tom-boy mum desperately wanted to beat her older brothers. Seizing the opportunity, she had sneaked out of the Anderson shelter and into the house to perfect her jumping skills while they were all asleep. But in the dark she had misjudged the leap and crashed against the door, ripping her face on the hooked metal latch.
The tear across her face was raw and deep. There was blood everywhere.
They went up to the kitchen and Timo tried to stop the flow with rags, but it kept coming. My mum obviously needed stitches and he was worried about concussion too. As he stood there beside the sink dabbing uselessly at her face the drone of the first bomber planes thrummed overhead.
It was at this point that my Nan appeared. She’d woken in the shelter and, finding both Timo and my mum missing, had gone in search of them. She burst into tears when she saw the state of my mum’s face, but that was nothing compared to the howling that came next when Timo bundled his daughter into her school coat and said the only thing to do was to get her to a hospital.
* * * *
And so it was that on the worst night of the London Blitz, Timo and my mum walked together through the bombarded streets to The Royal Northern Hospital at Holloway. Fires burned in the east and all around them they could hear the steady crumping thud of the bombs that changed the face of the capital for ever.
Timo had to carry my mum part of the way. “But she never cried and she never once said she was frightened. She was the bravest little girl in London,” he told me. (I always loved that part of the story).
He, on the other hand, was terrified. And so was the doctor at the hospital – a young, softly spoken Polish refugee. He agreed immediately that Timo had done the right thing, but as he carefully staunched the blood and repaired my mum’s torn face the sound of constant bombing rocked the hospital walls and made the implements on his metal tray clatter about. In fact, the doctor’s hands shook so much as he sewed twenty-five stitches into my mum’s lip and cheek that he kept apologising for his ‘poor workmanship’.
As he finished the task, the first of the real casualties of that night began to arrive. Timo and my mum were taken to a nearby shelter and they spent the rest of a sleepless night there while the streets of London – the East End in particular – became an inferno.
When they finally walked home the next morning through eerily deserted and sometimes devastated streets, Timo was silent, desperately willing the rest of his family to be safe and alive. My mum was quiet too, until they turned the corner into their gloriously untouched road.
Then she squeezed his hand and spoke in a muffled voice because of the stitches in her lip. “I hope the dog is safe too?”
“What dog?” he asked, confused.
“The little one that came with us from home last night. He followed us all the way. Didn’t you see him, Timo?”
Dog Portrait courtesy of Libby Hall Collection at the Bishopsgate Institute
Song Of The Long-Gone
It has been my long-held ambition to publish fiction on Spitalfields Life and today it is my great pleasure to introduce this haunting vignette by Sarah Winman author of When God Was A Rabbit, as the first of three Ghost Stories Of Old London specially written for the occasion by Contributing Writers – Kate Griffin & Rosie Dastgir’s stories will follow tomorrow and the next day.
December 1930. The first flutter of snow fell with dusk and settled quietly along Fleet Lane and Old Bailey. Nobody saw the boy leave the tenement but his footprints were visible as he made his way down to Ludgate Hill, to the warehouses and wharves on the north shore of the Thames.
Trig Lane was snowless. The towering warehouses protected the narrow pass and the boy stood at the top of the steps and let the familiar smell of the river soothe him. The tide was out, the river quiet, the cranes opposite were eerie and still. He was only nine but he looked older because he felt things deeply and was a deep thinker. He listened to the lap of waves upon the shingle and thought it to be the loneliest sound. Like a dog, he heard things that most people didn’t. Sometimes at night, he heard the flick flick flick of ropes against a mast, and sometimes he heard an indescribable sound, a sound that, had he been older, he would have known to be the sound of longing because it lived in the space where his father should have been.
Six months before the boy had asked about his father. Your father was a sailor, his mother had said.
“What was he like?”
“Like you.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Down by the river.”
“When’s he coming home?”
“Soon.”
“How soon?”
“Christmas soon.”
Six days to go.
The boy stepped down onto the snowy foreshore and ran his hand across a barge sunk low in the ooze. He stumbled to the water’s edge where waves lapped at his ankles and rivermud ate his shoes.
Now is the time, he thought.
Carefully, he took out a boatswain’s whistle from his pocket. His mother had told him it was his father’s whistle and the boy believed her because he needed to. The metal was cold against his lips. He clasped his hand around the narrow tube, placed his finger over the hole, inhaled carefully, and blew. He lifted his finger for another pitch, lowered it, lifted it again until the shrill notes pierced the chill air with their sole intent: You can come home now!
And for hours those notes cut across the river to Southwark, to Bermondsey, to the streets beyond, and business slowed as heads rose from tasks, and conversations halted mid-flow, as memory and, for some, the return of melancholy were stirred by that plaintive call.
In an attic room on Borough High Street, Mr Alfred Booker moved the leather from the last and held up the outline of a shoe to the window pane. In the quiet light, the object was already a thing of beauty, and with poetry in his heart, he looked down at the uneven stumps of his legs – one rooted to the earth, the other falling short – and a life-long sorrow lifted and he whispered through the calling notes, “I am enough.”
And then a mile west, in Gibbin’s confectionary store, young Miss Jevers suddenly halted the sale of her aniseed balls, when she inexplicably cried out, “Actually, I’ve changed my mind!” and they were left rolling in the weighing bowl, as she shuddered at that unnatural happening, that strange occurrence the day her taste changed, when she chose peppermints over aniseed, and when she would later choose Miss Nevis over Mr Greene. And she would remember that day like a birthday, for that was what it was: a new beginning.
And as the notes drifted from the boy’s mouth, so they entered his mother’s heart and took her back to her Past, back down to Wapping High Street and those mossy old steps that glistened with the slap of waves, where she stood, intoxicated, awaiting the shadow of the row boat and the grin of her man and the rough hand that led her up the steep incline, past the laughing singing voices from the Town of Ramsgate, over the cobbled road to the ancient wall of St John’s graveyard, where, giggling through the sacred dark they stumbled towards the broad trunk of a chestnut tree, and there, under the eyes of the Dead, they created life.
You can come home now!
Onwards and upwards those notes twirled, tripping upon the crested waves as the river grew fat, grew dark and high. And some notes fell upon the wings of gulls and were carried downriver beyond Tower Bridge where the Lightermen paused and doffed their caps as a sign of respect to a song they all knew. And some notes were carried down chimneys into hostels and hospitals, soothing the fractured and whispering to the lonely.
On and on the boy played, lost in his song, unaware of the mud sucking at his knees and the water swirling about his neck.
Candles were lit across the city and people spoke to those they didn’t know and grievances were forgotten and extra places were laid at tables and hats were raised and smiles replaced frowns and unspoken memories were spoken of once again. And the boy felt warm and never felt the icy blast that swamped his lungs and stilled his heart and never felt the blanket of eternal dark that fell like night because that was the moment when he saw a face, and it was a bright face with a wide grin surrounded by light. And it was his face but so much older.
You came home, said the boy.
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
St Paul’s Of Old London
At midnight on Christmas Eve, I found myself standing inside St Paul’s Cathedral among the the company of several hundred other souls. The vast interior space of the cathedral is a world unto itself when you are within it, as much landscape as architecture, yet when the great clock struck twelve overhead, my thoughts were transported to the rain falling upon the empty streets in the dark city beyond. Perhaps I was thinking of some of these lantern slides created a century ago by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for lectures at the Bishopsgate Institute?
Until 1962, St Paul’s was the tallest building in London and, in my perception of the city, it will always stand head and shoulders above everything else. Even before I saw it for myself, I already knew the shape of the monstrous dome from innumerable printed images and looming skyline appearances in films. Defying all competition, the great cranium of the dome contains a spiritual force that no other building in London can match.
A true wonder of architecture, St Paul’s never fails to induce awe when you return to it because the reality of its scale always surpasses your expectation – as if the mind itself cannot fully contain the memory of a building of such ambition and scale. No-one can deny the sense of order, with every detail sublimated to Sir Christopher Wren’s grand conception, yet the building defies you.
Although every aspect has its proportion and purpose, the elaborate intricacy expresses something beyond reason or logic. You are within the skull of a sleeping giant, dreaming the history of London, with its glittering panoply and dark episodes. The success of this building is to render everything else marginal, because when you are inside it you feel you are at the centre of the world.
Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
You may also like to take a look at
The Lantern Slides of Old London
The High Days & Holidays of Old London
The Fogs & Smogs of Old London
The Forgotten Corners of Old London
The Statues & Effigies of Old London
Viscountess Boudica’s Christmas
Let it be said that if anyone in the East End knows how to keep the spirit of Christmas, it is the Viscountess Boudica of Bethnal Green. At this time of year, her tiny flat near Columbia Rd is transformed into a secret Winter Wonderland where the visitor may forget the chill of the gloomy streets outside and enter a realm of magic, fantasy and romance in which the Viscountess holds court like a benevolent sprite or fairy godmother, celebrating the season of goodwill in her own inimitable style.
Boudica had already been at work for weeks when I arrived with my camera to capture the Christmas spectacle for your delight, yet she was still putting the finishing touches to her display even as I walked through the door. “You see these bells?” she said, reaching up to add them to the colourful forest of paper decorations suspended from the ceiling,“I bought them in Woolworths in Tottenham for 45p in 1984. When I think of all the people they have looked down upon – if only these bells could talk, they’ve seen it all!”
Evidence of the season was apparent wherever I turned my eyes, from the illuminated coloured trees that filled each corner – giving the impression that the room was actually a woodland glade – to the table where Boudica was wrapping her gifts and writing cards, to the corner where a stack of festive records awaited her selection, to the innumerable Christmas knick-knacks and figures that crowded every surface, and the light-up reindeer outside in the garden, glimpsed discreetly through the net curtains. “This is thirty years worth of collecting,” she explained, gesturing to the magnificent display enfolding us, “that set of lights is older than I am.”
In common with many, this is an equivocal time for Viscountess Boudica who does not have happy childhood memories of Christmas. “It was hell,” she admitted to me frankly, “We didn’t have any money to buy presents and, in our family, Christmas was always when fights and arguments would break out. The reason I have so many decorations now is to make up for all the years when I didn’t have any.” Yet Boudica remembers small acts of kindness too. “The local shops used to save me their balloons and give me scraps of fabric that I used to make clothes for the kittens in the barn – and that was the beginning of me making my own outfits,” she recalled fondly.
“People should remember what it’s all about,” Boudica assured me, linking her own childhood with the Christian narrative,“It’s about a little boy who didn’t have a home. They should think of others and remember there’s poor people here in Bethnal Green.” Naturally, I asked the Viscountess if she had a Christmas message for the world and, without a second thought, she came to back to me with her declaration – “Be kind to each other and get rid of discrimination!”
Boudica contemplates her Christmas listening – will it be Andy Williams or Jim Reeves this year?
“Whenever I hang up these bells, I think of all the people they have looked down upon over the years”
Wrapping up her gifts.
Filling her stocking
Nollaig Shona Dhaoibh!
Drawings copyright © Viscountess Boudica
You may like to read my other Christmas stories
Christmas At Gardners Market Sundriesmen
Paul Gardner takes last-minute Christmas orders for paper bags
The grey streets were empty with the first drops of rain falling yesterday, as I made my way to visit my friend Paul Gardner, the paper bag baron and fourth generation proprietor of the Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen, the oldest family business in Spitalfields. Yet the lights were gleaming brightly at his shop in Commercial St upon all the colourful bags, stacked in such appealing disarray as if a shipload of paper bags had been wrecked and washed up here upon the tide.
“Stephen’s been here helping me, as it’s been mental,” admitted Paul with a significant cheery gesture towards the mysterious darkness at the rear of the shop where his son – recently returned from Latin America – was now taking on the formidable challenge of organising Paul’s stock room. “People do wonder how I find anything and it doesn’t normally matter, but packets were falling on Stephen’s head,” Paul confessed to me with an explanatory grimace, “Now, if I say ‘twisted handle brown paper carrier bags’ he knows where they are.”
And thus it is that for the first time in a generation, the use of the plural on the shop sign, “Gardners Market Sundriesmen” has its literal meaning once more.
Meanwhile, as passersby struggled up Commercial St with their feeble umbrellas turning inside-out in the accumulating gale-force winds, inside Paul’s shop, the Christmas storm appeared to have already passed through. “I could possibly take the day off on Christmas Eve,” he deliberated idly, egged on by his son,“but I promised to deliver to the Beigel Bakery and I’ll be up at five-thirty anyway…”
Paul’s dilemma was left unresolved because Stanley, a fellow Market Sundriesman and long-standing customer who trades in paper bags from the back of a van, popped by to pick up stock and dispense greetings. “It’s changed a lot round here in thirty-two years, it’s a different life !” he declared in disbelief, shaking Paul’s hand forcibly with an excess of season goodwill, “Not that he has changed, just got more curly.”
Upon his swift departure, a girl with waist-length red hair stumbled in from the storm, her bleary eyes widening in amazement at the spectacle. “Hello!” she announced in delight, “I’ve not been here before – it’s fantastic!” Paul proposed candy-striped bags, as the most suitable for the chocolates she was making as gifts. “Red and green are very popular at this time of year,” he ventured tentatively as she made a reckoning of the contents of the coins in her purse. “I only need about ten,” she revealed apologetically. “That’ll be fifty pence for ten,” Paul answered, causing her to break into a big smile. “I’ll take another five,” she decided recklessly.
The downpour had begun and an exhausted shopkeeper in a wet coat was next through the door. “F*ck Christmas! It’s so stressful,” he pleaded wearily, “I never get a chance to enjoy it, so I’m taking three days off including Friday – that’s not a luxury is it? I’ve had such a crappy year.” Paul, Stephen and me, we all nodded sagely in confirmation of his wise decision, and – resolved – he took his bags and left quickly.
Yet Paul was still uncertain regarding the big question of Christmas Eve opening.“I’ve stayed here before on Christmas Eve and taken a fiver and got fed up and gone home,” he recalled, thinking out loud for the benefit of Stephen and me, until we were interrupted again. “I’ve got to leave at once!” gasped the visitor, gesturing to his vehicle parked on the red route outside,“I’ve got all the cameras watching me with the compliments of the season.” Next came a man in an ankle-length military coat who wanted butcher’s hooks and then a fashionably-dressed woman who needed three hundred popcorn bags, “for the Secret Cinema at the Troxy.”
“My mum sounded fed up on the phone,” Paul confided to me during a lull in the morning,“So Stephen, Robert and me, we’re going to get up at dawn on Christmas Morning and drive down to her house at Frinton. Then we’re going to call her and tell her to get up because Father Christmas is outside, and Robert’s going to play his trombone!” Father and son exchanged a mischievous smile of complicity in anticipation of the imminent festival.
“All these bloody Christmas shoppers!” the manager of a local shoe shop exclaimed in near-hysteria – breaking our reverie as he barged through the door – dripping with rain and glowing in frustration,“The General Public turned into savages yesterday. Everyone’s buying double of everything – I only wish the coppers were going into my pocket.” Then he staggered off with an armful of carrier bags that seemed to placate his emotion. And there were no more customers and a silence fell upon the shop as the trade ebbed away.
“I’ve been pleasantly surprised,” said Paul, when the time came to close up and depart into the raging storm outside, “It’s always hit and miss at Christmas.”
“I’ll come in early in the morning tomorrow and see what happens,” he decided, heartened by the day’s custom and discovering resolution all-of-a-sudden, “I’ve got two days holiday after that and then the weekend, so it’s not too bad.”
Paul’s son Stephen has just returned from travelling through Latin America
Paul & Stephen, fourth and fifth generation Market Sundriesmen
Paul mans the counter at the front …
… while Stephen organises the stock at the rear
Stephen takes a turn behind the counter – “Are you his son? You look like him?”
Stanley, a customer of thirty-two years standing, pops by to deliver a Christmas greeting – “It’s changed a lot round here in thirty-two years, it’s a different life! Not that he has changed, just got more curly.”
Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen, 149 Commercial St, E1 6BJ (open from 6:30am on Christmas Eve)
You may like to read my other stories about Paul Gardner
Paul Gardner, Paper Bag Seller
At Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
Joan Rose at Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen
Christmas Meat Auction At Smithfield
I am publishing my story of the Christmas Eve Meat Auction at Smithfield today as a reminder to any readers who may wish to go along tomorrow, because – unless SAVE Britain’s Heritage is successful in preventing the proposed demolition of the General Market next year – this could be your last chance to witness this annual tradition.
The carnivores of London converged upon Smithfield Market, as they do every year for the annual Christmas Eve auction staged by Harts the Butcher. At ten in the morning, the rainy streets were almost empty yet, as I came through Smithfield, butchers in white overalls were wheeling precarious trolleys top-heavy with meat and fowls over to the site of the auction where an expectant crowd of around a hundred had gathered, anxiously clutching wads of banknotes in one hand and bags to carry off their prospective haul in the other.
Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien met me there. He grew up half a mile away in Clerkenwell during the nineteen fifties and, although it was his first time at the auction, he remembered his father walking down to Smithfield to get a cheap turkey on Christmas Eve more than sixty years ago. Overhearing this reminiscence, a robust woman standing next to us in the crowd struck up a conversation as a means to relieve the growing tension before the start of the auction which is the highlight of the entire year for many of stalwarts that have been coming for decades.
“You can almost guarantee getting a turkey,” she reassured us with the authority of experience, revealing she had been in attendance for fifteen successive years. Then, growing visibly excited as a thought came into her mind, “Last year, I got thirty kilos of sirloin steak for free – I tossed for it!”, she confided to us, turning unexpectedly flirtatious. Colin and I stood in silent wonder at her good fortune with meat.“We start preparing in October by eating all the meat in the freezer,” she explained, to clarify the situation. “Last night we had steak,” she continued, rubbing her hands in gleeful anticipation, “and steak again tonight.”
Yet our acquaintance was terminated as quickly as it began when the caller appeared in a blood-stained white coat and red tie to introduce the auction. A stubby bullet-headed man, he raised his hands graciously to quell the crowd. “This is a proper English tradition,” he announced, “it has been going on for the last five hundred years. And I’m going to make sure everybody goes away with something and I’m here to take your money.”
His words drew an appreciative roar from the crowd as dozens of eager hands were thrust in the air waving banknotes, indicative of the collective blood lust that gripped the assembly. Standing there in the midst of the excitement, I realised that the sound I could hear was an echo. It was a reverberation of the famously uproarious Bartholomew Fair which flourished upon this site from the twelfth century until it was suppressed for public disorder in 1855. Yesterday, the simple word “Hush!” from the caller was enough to suppress the mob as he queried, “What are we going to start with?”
The answer to his question became manifest when several bright pink loins of pork appeared as if by magic in the hatch beside him, held by butchers beneath, and dancing jauntily above the heads of the delighted audience like hand puppets. These English loins of pork were soon dispatched into the crowd at twenty pounds each as the curtain warmer to the pantomime that was to come, followed by joints of beef for a tenner preceding the star attraction of day – the turkeys! – greeted with festive cheers by the hungry revellers. “Mind your heads, turkeys coming over…” warned the butcher as the turkeys in their red wrappers set out crowd-surfing to their grateful prospective owners as the cash was passed hand to hand back to the stand.
It would not be an understatement to say that mass hysteria had overtaken the crowd, yet there was another element to add to the chaos of the day. As the crowd had enlarged, it spilled over into the road with cars and vans weaving their through the overwrought gathering. “I love coming for the adventure of it,” declared one gentleman with hair awry, embracing a side of beef protectively as if it was the love of his life, “Everyone helps one another out here. You pass the money over and there’s no pickpockets.”
After the turkeys came the geese, the loins of lamb, the ribs of beef, the pork bellies, the racks of lamb, the fillet steaks and the green gammon to complete the bill of fare. As the energy rose, butchers began to throw pieces of red meat into the crowd to be caught by their purchasers and it was surreal to watch legs of lamb and even suckling pigs go flying into the tumultuous mass of people. Finally, came tossing for meat where customers had the chance of getting their steaks for free if they guessed the toss correctly, and each winning guess was greeted with an exultant cheer because by then the butchers and the crowd were as one, fellow participants in a boisterous party game.
Just ninety minutes after it began, the auction wrapped up, leaving the crowd to consolidate their proud purchases, tucking the meat and fowls up snugly in suitcases and backpacks to keep them safe until they could be stowed away in the freezer at home. In the disorder, I saw piles of bloody meat stacked on the muddy pavement where people were tripping over them. Yet a sense of fulfilment prevailed, everyone had stocked up for another year – their carnivorous appetites satiated – and they were going home to eat meat.
As I walked back through the narrow City streets, I contemplated the spectacle of the morning. It resembled a Bacchanale or some ancient pagan celebration in which people were liberated to pursue their animal instincts. But then I realised that my thinking was too complicated – it was Christmas I had witnessed.
Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien
You might also like to read about
